Dis-membering Stonewall

The following is from an essay that appears in a new collection of LGBT writings about New York City, Love, Christopher Street: Reflections of New York City, edited by Thomas Keith, with an introduction by Christopher Bram, and published by Vantage Point Books. The names in the story has been changed to protect identities.

Friday, June 27th, was the last day of school that year. And with school out, my middle-school cronies and I looked forward to a summer reprieve from rioting against Italian, Irish and Jewish public school kids for being bussed into their neighborhoods. However, the summer months in Brooklyn’s African American enclaves only escalated rioting between New York’s finest—the New York Police Department—and us. During this tumultuous decade of Black rage and white police raids, knee-jerk responses to each other’s slights easily set the stage for a conflagration, creating both instantaneous and momentary fighting alliances in these Black communities­ across gangs, class, age, ethnicity and sexual orientations—against police brutality…

(Click on the picture to read the rest on the GLAAD Blog.)